Nearly 20 years after shooting, Granada Hills Jewish Community Center survivors remember their own ‘dark days’

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Josh Stepakoff, 25, was six years old when he wounded during the mass shooting at the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills in 1999. (Photo by Hans Gutknecht, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

Donna Finkelstein and a friend were on their way to Lancaster over the weekend when Finkelstein got a call from her husband.

There was a shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, he told her. Multiple deaths.

Then came the flashback: On Aug. 10, 1999, a heavily armed white supremacist Buford O’Neal Furrow Jr. walked into the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills. He fired 70 shots, wounding three children, a teenage camp counselor and an office worker. All the victims at the Jewish community center survived, but Furrow later shot and killed Joseph Ileto, a Filipino-American postal worker Furrow said he targeted because he was a non-white federal government employee.

Finkelstein’s daughter Mindy was the 16-year-old summer camp counselor wounded in the attack.

“From that moment forward, I was just weeping,” Finkelstein said, referring to the news about Saturday’s rampage. “This particular shooting really got to my core, even though it’s been 19-plus years. It brought up all the memories of the shooting when my daughter almost died.”

She was not alone.

The shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh that left 11 people dead and a nation reeling had survivors of the Granada Hills shooting remembering the day nearly 20 years ago when the actions of a hate-fueled shooter profoundly changed their lives.

Josh Stepakoff, 25, was 6 years old when he wounded during the shooting at the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills in 1999. (Photo by Hans Gutknecht, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

After the 1999 shooting, Furrow told detectives he wanted to kill Jews, though he would later renounce his white-surpremacist views while expressing “deep remorse” for his crime. Robert Bowers, the suspect in Saturday’s shooting, was clear about his hatred for Jewish people, frequently posting anti-Semitic threats and conspiracy theories online, according to authorities.

‘Dark days’ changed lives

At the time of the shooting at the Jewish Community Center, mass shootings were not such frequent news headlines as they are now. The massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., leaving 15 dead had just happened the previous April, stunning a nation that had yet to become so accustomed to such things. But over time, Finkelstein became used to reporters calling her for interviews with each new mass shooting.

Los Angeles police officers lead children to safety after Buford O. Furrow Jr. walked into the North valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills and opened fire with a semi-automatic weapon. He wounded three children, a teenage counselor, and an office worker.

Those “dark days,” after Mindy and other children at the center were shot, motivated Donna Finkelstein to take action. After it was clear her daughter would recover, she turned to activism. She went to Washington, D.C., to join the Million Mom March in 2000, a movement calling for stricter gun control that grew out of the 1999 shooting. She’s part of the San Fernando Valley chapter of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and on the board of Women Against Gun Violence. She talks to parents and students about gun safety, teen suicide and violence prevention.

While she feels there has been progress in California on gun control, at a national level, it’s different. What’s also concerning, she said, is evidence of an increase in hate crimes against minority groups, including Jews.

“It’s scary times where there’s an increase of hate crimes against the black community, the Jewish community,” she said.

Now that mass shootings are more frequent, it feels like they can happen anywhere, she added.

“It’s where we are, whether it’s at the mall, school, a house of worship, driving our car, going to the movies,” Finkelstein said. “Victims say, “I thought it would never happen here. Well, it does.”

Slow progress

Josh Stepakoff was 6 years old when he was shot in the 1999 attack. The shooting galvanized his parents, and later Stepakoff too, on the gun control debate.

Now 25, Stepakoff is a real estate agent in Northridge, a board member of Women Against Gun Violence and engaged to be married. He had just come home after an appointment when he saw news of the Pittsburgh shooting on TV.

“I’m sad to say it, but I didn’t have much of a reaction at the moment because I’m really used to hearing these stories,” Stepakoff said. His sadness is competing with his anger, he added, that such an attack could happen at a place that is meant to be welcoming.

“That easily could’ve been avoided if we took a step back and realized that our fetish over firearms is not as important as life,” Stepakoff said.

Parents wait for information about their children who were in a daycare facility where shots were fired in the lobby at the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills, California Tuesday morning, August 10, 1999.

Stepakoff, like Finkelstein and her daughter, said California’s gun control laws are a reason for optimism, whereas the same isn’t true on a national level.

“There are times that we’re making progress, and a lot of that has been undone,” he said. For example, President Bill Clinton’s assault weapons ban expired and wasn’t renewed under President George W. Bush, while Los Angeles saw Mayor Eric Garcetti sign into law a ban on large-capacity magazines.

“I see us as country walking backwards. But, on the other hand, here in California L.A., we’ve made massive strides moving in the opposite direction.”

The anti-Semitism that’s a theme of Saturday’s attack and the 1999 shooting may have been surprising 20 years ago, but not so much now, Stepakoff said.

“In 1999, it was kind of shock to everybody to know that Naziism was still around,” he said. Now, there are “people who already believe these things.”

Concerned about the rhetoric

Stepakoff and Finkelstein are both concerned about the state of the nation’s discourse.

“Widespread hatred has become a little more acceptable, and I blame that a lot on the rhetoric of our country.”

Those with hateful ideologies now have “more of a platform and feel more comfortable with their voice now.”

Finkelstein went further, finding blame for the heated rhetoric and the crime that follows in the highest elected offices in the land.

“It’s on the rise, and I attribute that also to our president, and the lack of the Republican party coming up against this and saying anything,” she said.

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Mindy, Donna Finkelstein’s daughter, is now 35 and lives in the Bay Area. After she was shot at the community center in 1999, she found herself thrown into the gun debate. Over the last nearly 20 years, she’s taken an active role in speaking for stricter gun control.

But now as a mom and a wife, she’s taken a step back from her previous activism on gun control. Saturday’s shooting still shook her.

“I was devastated. Everyone around me is devastated and shocked, but not completely surprised, based on the culture we’re currently living in,” she said.

Antonie Boessenkool is a freelancer who previously covered education and the Los Angeles Unified School District for the Los Angeles Daily News. She previously worked in Washington, D.C., covering finance and the defense industry, and in Bakersfield, covering city government. In Orange County, she wrote about arts, features and home decor.